Peer-to-Peer Accountability Enforcement

About

Friend-based policing, short for friend-based online community policing, is a methodology for sharply reducing the problem of bad-faith commenting (including both outright verbal abuse as well as abuses that are harder to spot, such as sea-lioning) by allowing users to collectively delegate other trusted users to rate comments and commenters as to their credibility and appropriateness. It generally increases per-user accountability for abuse, but with the source of that accountability being other users rather than a central authority (with all the bottlenecking that implies).

Pages:

• /purpose - this needs to be a bit more general
• /mechanism - the quasi-technical details

Related

• /Periscope has implemented "safety features" which have a lot in common with this idea

Notes

Things that credibility management should be able to defeat or at least control:

• sea-lioning (see Issuepedia): appears civil and polite on the surface, so may be difficult to judge without understanding the full context
• brigading -- though it may take a combination of credibility management and debate mapping:
  • 2015-07-17 There are good reasons I’ve never been a fan of Reddit
• evaporative cooling:
  • 2010-10-10 Social Software Sundays #2 – The Evaporative Cooling Effect
• click-farming ...except I'm not understanding the value of having fake followers:
  • 2015-04-20 How Click Farms Have Inflated Social Media Currency
    • private discussion here
• online harassment
  • 2014-10-09 The Unsafety Net: How Social Media Turned Against Women (via)

Credibility management is beginning to look potentially useful for rating subjective quality of aesthetic works. Some discussion of that application is here:

• 2014-06-20 Content rating, moderation, and ranking systems: some non-brief thoughts (Edward Morbius).
  • Related: 2014-09-21 Specifying a Universal Online Media Payment Syndication System
    • which was a sequel to: 2014-01-08 A Modest Proposal: Universal Online Media Payment Syndication
• 2012-02-08 Tribler Makes BitTorrent Impossible to Shut Down (via) "Where most torrent sites have a team of moderators to delete viruses, malware and fake files, Tribler uses crowd-sourcing to keep the network clean. Content is verified by user generated “channels”, which can be “liked” by others. When more people like a channel, the associated torrents get a boost in the search results."
• 2011-02-05 What is Quora's algorithm/formula for determining the ordering/ranking of answers on a question?: this is a similar concept on the surface, but lacks some important elements:
  • no proxying/layering -- all ratings are direct
  • no personalized credibility ratings (PCRs)
  • minimal granularity, i.e. only two possible values (-1/+1) for each ranking